


world enough and time

by ygrittebardots



Series: had we but world enough and time [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cultural Differences, F/M, Jon Snow Knows Nothing, Mild Sexual Content, Pregnancy, Ygritte also knows nothing but is better at pretending, mentions of child murder and other violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-19 04:07:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19349188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ygrittebardots/pseuds/ygrittebardots
Summary: “He didn’t prepare me for this,” Jon says at last, and there’s no accusation in his voice, no trace of anger or disappointment, just the truth laid bare. “Robb was meant to lead, not me. It was never supposed to be me.”After being named King in the North, Jon is having doubts, but Ygritte doesn't appreciate waking up to an empty bed.Or: the one where Ygritte lives.





	world enough and time

**Author's Note:**

> I'm playing fast and loose with canon here - obviously the events line up with season 6's show canon, but I imagine Jon and Ygritte somewhere closer to their book ages. Let’s split the difference and say he’s 19 and she’s 22. 
> 
> Which means Rickon was like 9 at the oldest at Battle of the Bastards so sorry about the child murder. :|
> 
> Based off princessarcastia’s Tumblr prompt: "throne & chains"

She wakes to silence, and to warmth, and she’s still getting used to that. 

Winterfell is the furthest south she’s ever been, and yet the castle’s high walls were built to flow with the heated water from the deep pools beneath the firmaments. She’d ribbed Jon hard for that when he’d first told her, but she  _is_  coming to appreciate the benefits.

Beneath her furs, Ygritte luxuriates in the sensation they create against bare skin, stretching out to accommodate the pleasant little aches and pops in her legs and back.

That’s when she notices.

Jon’s a light sleeper, but a clingy one. Hardly a morning goes by that she doesn’t wake to find a heavy leg slung over hers, at the very least. More often than that it’s his arms wrapped tight about her, chest flush against her back, the shifting of hair and the slow pattern of sleeping breath against her neck. Twice now this week she’s woken to a calloused hand pressed firmly against her womb, and she’s not entirely sure either was an accident.

But no. That can’t be. 

They haven’t had that conversation yet.

The Free Folk take no chances, and that goes double where children are concerned. No names given until a child’s survived two full years in the world. No announcements for her condition at all until someone else takes notice. It’s terrible luck otherwise. And she’s made that mistake once before.

In any case, Jon’s hands are nowhere near that little growing secret now, and nowhere close by, either. He’s not in their bed, and a cursory glance about the dark room he once shared with his brother is enough to tell her he's left it entirely.

The castle by night is as imposing as it is by day. Ygritte draws the cloak of Jon’s that she’s appropriated more tightly around herself as she slips out into the corridor, shivering despite the warmth the walls provide. 

Before Winterfell, Castle Black had been the largest keep she’d lain eyes on, and she hadn’t known enough then to know it was a ruin. She’d known later, well enough. The Gift was full of them. Fallen towers and half-built keeps littered the lands Tormund had led her and what else remained of their people through. 

That was back when she still cursed whatever madness had stopped her from putting an arrow through Jon Snow’s heart. Back when that seemed to matter. 

Before they told her he was dead.

Before the Red Woman. 

( _She takes him hard against the floor that first night, one hand wound tight in his black mess of hair and the other scraping deep lacerations in the hardened earth. Jon's lips are bloody instead of just swollen where they'd crushed against hers, and Ygritte’s body shakes as he marks her, leaving a trail of tooth and blood in his wake._

_He tells her to hush even as he sucks on that sensitive patch of skin just beneath her collarbone. She hisses as he enters her, but is silenced with a kiss, deep and bruising, that leaves her empty in its absence._

_She wonders, later, if it's the dying that changed things._

_Then she wonders if it just gave him the excuse he needed to be what he was the whole time._ )

Later, at the battle - _the Battle of the Bastards_ , they’re calling it, but she refuses to put Jon at any sort of equation with the monster she watched put an arrow through his baby brother, the one who gave his sister all those scars - she’d merely glimpsed the stronghold of the kneelers’ North from a distance at the start, and even then she’d been convinced her eyes were playing her for a fool.

As it turns out, they weren’t. Ygritte thinks she might have the keep figured out more or less by now, but she’d gotten hopelessly lost in her first days here. Servants and lords alike - still here, in the wake of battle, to clean up the mess - had been polite enough to point her on her way, but she’d seen the confusion in their eyes, the mistrust, the questions.

So yes, she knows something of Winterfell now. She knows the Godswood with its weeping weirwood so like the one in the village where she spent her early years with Da. She knows the training yard, where little Lyanna Mormont had asked her frankly for guidance in her bow work. She thinks she’s beginning to know the people, the ones they call  _smallfolk_ , at least. 

And she knows where Jon goes when he needs to be with his thoughts.

There’s a flickering light at the far end of the crypt when she arrives. Ygritte says nothing, simply comes to a stop next to him, and stares with him at the carved likeness of Eddard Stark, forever etched in stone.

He does nothing to acknowledge her presence, but accepts her hand in his readily enough when she takes it. The silence of the crypts sets in around them, a comfortable sort of weight despite the history that lives in these halls, a history she knows has rarely been kind to her people. 

“He didn’t prepare me for this,” Jon says at last, and there’s no accusation in his voice, no trace of anger or disappointment, just the truth laid bare. “Robb was meant to lead, not me. It was never supposed to be me.”

And then.

"Are you angry with me?"

Despite herself, Ygritte laughs. She hadn't expected that.

"Why would I be angry with you?"

"I didn't refuse."

"Good thing, too. You'd be sleeping alone tonight if you'd been idiot enough to try."

Jon frowns, and finally looks at her.

“I thought you’d be angry. Your people don’t have kings.”

“We do,” she counters. “We did. We had Mance.” 

“Mance was - “

“The king we chose. And we were part of them that chose you.”

Sighing heavily, Jon runs a hand over his tired face, and looks at once far too old and much too young for his age. 

“Ygritte - ”

“Refuse and this alliance falls apart, you know it does.”

“It ought to have been Sansa. She’s my father’s only living trueborn child. His heir.”

“Good thing then they didn’t name you your father’s heir, then. They named you King.”

And there it is.

Ygritte can’t begin to know the demons that haunt him in this. There’s too much south of the Wall that remains foreign to her - trueborn children and bastards, lands and titles, alliances and inheritance. North of the Wall, children all learn the same things from their parents, mainly how to survive to see the next summer. The quality of that education depends on the parents, not the children. That's one difference she's never going to understand.

But what she _can_ understand is the new weariness settled across Jon's face, and if there's one thing she's prided herself on since first falling for this grim southern boy, it's her ability to make him smile.

"So you don't want it - is that what this is about?" she asks, and flicks his ear hard with her nail.

"Oy!" he shouts, and grabs her wrist. 

She grins.

Jon rolls his eyes and releases her, looking all of ten and nine again.

"It's not about the _wanting_ ," he says. "It's about knowing how."

"Did you know how to be Lord Commander? At the start?"

"No."

"But you figured it out. And you were damn good at it."

"So good I got murdered over it."

Ygritte ignores that. 

"I've heard the crows all talking," she says. "You didn't ask for it - you wouldn't have let yourself, back then, I know you wouldn't. But they saw in you the same thing all those fancy lords tonight saw, and they chose you anyway. Even when you never asked."

She reaches around to grab his chin between her fingers, forcing him back to her from where his eyes have wandered again to his father's statue.

"I see it, too, just so we're clear on that," she says, and he lets her pull him in close. "You weren't raised for this, you were _chosen_. Isn't that better, anyway?"

Jon says nothing for a long moment, and she wonders what else she can possibly say to make him understand.

And then:

"You'll help me, won't you?"

It's small, and quiet, and Ygritte's heart wants to break because no matter what else he is, what else he's seen and done, Jon is still so young.

"Why do you think I stuck around?"

And with that she loops her fingers around the front clasp of his cloak, and pulls him into a bruising kiss. Her heart does a loop on itself when he responds immediately, urgently, fingers tangling in her hair as he draws her ever closer, as though any infinitesimal space between their lips could be treason itself. When they finally break apart, he presses his forehead to hers and for a time they simply stay there, breath mingling in the dark. 

"Besides," she says finally, because gods know she can't help herself, "I think I quite like the idea of being a queen."

He laughs at that. "Oh, queen, is it?"

"What else would you call it?"

"I suppose we _are_... um," he begins, before trailing off uncertainly.

"Married," she finishes for him helpfully.

"In a fashion."

Ygritte shrugs. 

"You stole me and I stole you right back. I'd call that married enough." She's never given it much thought, truth be told, but she's well aware that the Free Folk and southerners have a different understanding about what makes two people belong to each other. 

"I don't know that my bannermen will see it that way."

"Jon Snow!" she needles, grinning. "Are you asking me for a fancy wedding? In front of a tree and that? I knew this was all a plot to get me in that silk dress."

Jon laughs, and kisses her forehead. 

"It's probably too cold for silk this close to winter," he says, and she enjoys the way his arms have settled around her waist, "but I wouldn't be against the tree."

"Aye, I wouldn't either," she says, and finds that she's telling the truth.


End file.
